Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert? | Hacker News Reader

Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert?

bbc.com

41 pointsakandiah52 comments

The usual saying is that "the adjective is the enemy of the noun," but on this issue, you shouldn't think about "practice" except in combination with the word "deliberate." What Dan McLaughlin, the amateur golfer who is trying to become an expert golfer, is doing is testing out the idea that sufficiently structured and systematic practice with a coach can turn a moderately interested, not particularly talented average performer into an expert performer in the domain of playing golf.

The research base that developed the term "deliberate practice," (and, for that matter, more rigorously defined "expertise") comes from K. Anders Ericsson[1] and colleagues who contributed to the The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2006), a book[2] summarizing research in many domains of human performance.

There are a lot of popular books on these ideas, but only a few take care to distinguish deliberate practice from playful engagement or routine performance by an amateur, and only a few look carefully at the definition of "expert" performance. What's rigorously defined as "deliberate practice" (with coaching and monitoring of fine details of performance) is very hard to do long-term for more than four hours per day, which is why the "ten-year rule" was the original expression of some of the earliest findings on the development of expertise. Your sleeping hours don't count (directly) for development of expertise, nor eating nor hours spent on other daily activities, so it takes years to accumulate 10,000 hours of deliberate practice with necessary rest and play in between sessions of practice.

[1] http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html

[2] http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/psychology/cog...

From the article: Maybe talented people just practise more and try harder at the thing they're already good at - because they enjoy it?

There's a profound implication here: that you can train yourself to enjoy something you originally didn't. And even if it's no less hard of a problem than it is to make yourself a 10,000-hour expert in something, it's one with a broader impact.

I recently wrote a book on this topic[1][2], and you're quite right - most people seem to get wrapped up in the status that surrounds the idea of expertise when the real value of this research is what it tells us about how to go about acquiring new skills for personal or professional use.

As you mentioned, practicing to the point of enjoying the skill is the most effective strategy. If you can reach the point where practicing is fun, you're much more likely to continue leveling up.

Adult learners typically find the first few hours of practicing a new skill extremely frustrating, and a very low percentage will complete even 2-3 hours of deliberate practice if the skill is complex, ambiguous, or challenging. Somewhere around hours 3-10, however, you start to see clear improvements, and pushing through frustration is much less of a factor. That's the point where you start seeing clear results.

In my research/experience, the threshold for acquiring new skills for personal or professional use is somewhere around 20 hours. That's not "expertise" - it's being able to produce a desired result or enjoy the experience. In the vast majority of cases, you don't need to be an "expert" to derive value from practicing new skills.

Since most people have a hard time pushing through the early frustration barrier, 10-20 hours of strategic, deliberate practice will also give you a surprising level of competence compared to other people. All it really takes is having a smart strategy that ensures (1) you invest those early hours of practice in acquiring the most commonly-used sub-skills, (2) you alter your environment to make it as easy as possible to remove distractions, sit down, and do the work.

[1] Book: http://first20hours.com

[2] Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY

playful engagement can also be useful or even important. I think open-mindedness is more important here: you need to be able to absorb new concepts and accept experience into your action during the practice. I think that's why people with autism (looking at it through the Intense World glasses) can learn some things really fast, although they don't intentionally train certain things.

Playful engagement is certainly important, especially if you're practicing skills outside of a structured, measurable, competitive activity, but I'd question anything being more important to mastery than deliberate practice: Is it my bias or are successful competitors almost always very serious during practice, and relaxed after winning "matches"?

Can you recommend an overview? I could, for instance, read the Cambridge book but does it have an overview article or is a collection of individual areas articles?

10,000 hours (or thereabouts) of practice is one prerequisite. But you have to practice the right things. And for most people that means there needs to be some structure to their practice, some feedback from existing experts. Otherwise, how will you know what needs improvement or re-adjustment.

In the fantastic book "Lessons on the Fundamentals of Go", Toshiro Kageyama addresses this very topic in the introduction saying, "Of course one cannot make progress in any discipline without effort. 'There is no pleasure without pain.' Pleasure is progress, and pain the pain of effort. Study in the wrong way, however, and the result may be just pain with no pleasure at all. One must, without fail, learn the correct way to study."

I think the saying goes

--Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

Agreed. My musician son practices a new piece slowly, deliberately, speeding up as he gets it down. Takes a day or two for a piece that way - no wasted time unlearning/reworking early screw-ups that became routine.

Well, one of the best examples of "practice leads to excellence" is given by the story of Lazlo Polgar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

> László is an expert on chess theory and owns over 10,000 chess books. He is interested in the proper method of rearing children, believing that "geniuses are made, not born". Before he had any children, he wrote a book entitled Bring Up Genius!, and sought a wife to help him carry out his experiment. He found one in Klara, a schoolteacher, who lived in a Hungarian-speaking enclave in Ukraine. He married her in the USSR and brought her to Hungary. He home-schooled their three daughters, primarily in chess, and all three went on to become strong players.

Their three daughters:

Sofia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zs%C3%B3fia_Polg%C3%A1r

> In 1989, at the age of 14, she stunned the chess world by her performance in a tournament in Rome, which became known as the "Sack of Rome". She won the tournament, which included several strong grandmasters, with a score of 8½ out of 9. According to the Chessmetrics rating system, her performance rating was 2735;[3] one of the strongest performances in history by a 14-year-old.

Susan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar

> On the July 1984 FIDE Rating List, at the age of 15, she became the top-ranked woman player in the world, and remained ranked in the top three for the next 23 years. She was also the first woman in history to break the gender barrier by qualifying for the 1986 "Men's" World Championship

And Judit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

> Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is by far the strongest female chess player in history.[1] In 1991, Polgár achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, the youngest person to do so until then.

Hard to separate nature from nurture when you school your kids on your own area of expertise. Had he tried to make them into expert musicians or downhill skiers, his experiment might have more weight.

The experiment has been tried in downhill skiing too, I can think of several competitors at the Sochi Olympics who were coached by their (not expert skier) fathers.

But isn't the idea behind the 10,000 hour idea that you need constant high quality feedback and training?

Nope; just that you've been at it, studying and trying. The (Gladwell) examples are of folks in groups that learned together.

You would think he would have adopted, if he was serious about 'made, not born'.

I believe he wanted to try it later in his life (with adoptees) but his wife talked him out of it..

Would be difficult to school them in any meaningful way if he was not already proficient. Teaching is hard, particularly if you are trying to do something different to the standard (& therefore supported) model.

How about a child adopted at a young age. Trying to teach the kids something you are not is a different proposition altogether.

Being an ok chess player(FM) I used to be a big believer in Polgar story, but lately I've realize you do need more test cases. With such a small sample size it is hard to make conclusions.

If one of the Polgar daughters had been adopted, this would lead more credence to theory that practice by itself leads to excellence. I fear that you need at least some modicum of talent.

I've realized tutoring my own kids and my nephews that there is quite a range in natural abilities for certain skills in otherwise seemingly normal children. One nephew in particular is miles ahead in picking up chess concepts and he is the youngest of the group (at 7 years old). If he was not going to a specialized music school and getting his 10k deliberate practice hours there, I am sure he could become at least a master.

Let's put it this way: people spend more than 10,000 of their lives talking and writing (including hours spent at school), and the majority can hardly put together a good sentense.

Heck, an awful lot cannot even distinguish between you're and your.

But it is worth pointing out that while humans are very good at absorbing language, few people have put anywhere near 10,000 hours into deliberative practice of their language.

If you're inclined to argue because people probably do reach that amount of schooling, I'd observe that deliberative practice requires an extremely high degree of personalization, which the current school system is entirely incapable of providing in many subjects. Indeed, this is a very significant part of why I have so little respect for the current system; such huge, huge blocks of time given to it, where students are lucky to be operating at 20% of their learning capacity as they progress through their bulk learning exercises.... 10,000 hours of schooling may be a few hundred hours of deliberative practice, and that basically by luckily happening to match a particular exercise to exactly what that student needed to be deliberative at that point.

Many of the big innovations coming about in public schools are about creating deliberate, intentional, thoughtful practice by breaking students out into small groups with specialists who design lessons based on the students' current level and areas of need.

I'm one such specialist -- I teach math to groups of 4 fourth graders at a time, 45 minutes per group per day [0]. My students have averaged 1.6 years worth of growth this school year, and we still have 3 full months of school left. I'm not alone, either. In my poor inner city public school, there are 4 math fellows (so every fourth grader gets the same support), 5 reading interventionists, 2 special education specialists, a speech language pathologist, an occupational therapist, 4 or 5 enrichment teachers [1], and an after school program that includes tutoring and free dinner for families.

The system you have so little respect for isn't the "current system" where I'm at, it's a generation out of date. If this is important to you, come join us and bring your friends. Help us create and expand a learning environment that's personalized and differentiated based on student needs and abilities.

[0] http://www.teachindenver.com/teachindenver/how-to-apply/abou...

[1] "Arts & Culture, Career Exploration, Leadership, Pre-Collegiate, Recreation and Technology" - tied in with http://www.bgcmd.org/clubs/beacon-neighborhood-centers

'The system you have so little respect for isn't the "current system" where I'm at, it's a generation out of date.'

That's actually part of my belief set; unstoppable change in this direction is coming down, and while there will be much wringing of hands, it is going to be good for students, and that's where my allegiance lies in the end. You sound like you're on the cutting edge; I see no evidence at this time that the school system I'm in works like this, but I am hopeful that will change before my children get very far in. Best of luck to your efforts; please lead the way.

The fact that your results appear to be so far ahead of the non-personalized system is confirming evidence for my beliefs, too. Can you imagine what the "average" student would look like if we can compound that advantage over the ~13 years of education, over multiple disciplines? I feel that within my lifetime we may very well come to see this era that we are just beginning to exit as a dark age of education.

>>Let's put it this way: people spend more than 10,000 of their lives talking and writing (including hours spent at school), and the majority can hardly put together a good sentense.

If this wasn't a joke the irony is brilliant.

* sentence

*10,000 hours not 10,000 lives

>If this wasn't a joke the irony is brilliant.

Wasn't a joke. It sure does prove my point though [1]

>10,000 hours not 10,000 lives

Actually both hours and lives. I meant to write: "spend more than 10,000 hours of their lives" (or "life", if you wish).

[1] Well it doesn't, really, since I'm not a native speaker, so I haven't had those "10,000 hours" of honing my english. Plus, those are typos from hasty typing on a web textarea, not things I genuinely confuse.

Let's put it this way: people spend more than 10,000 of their lives talking and writing (including hours spent at school), and the majority can hardly put together a good sentense.

Heck, an awful lot cannot even distinguish between you're and your.

I once wrote (coined? invented?) a law which says that one cannot point out errors of grammar or spelling in another's writing, without committing embarrassing errors of one's own.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Well, the situation he described is not really Murphy's law.

It might be a case of "something gone wrong" (and in that sense covered by Murphy's law too), but that's overly generic, and he was going after something far more specific.

Yeah, I commit those all the time when posting. I usually need 3-4 passes if I want to make sure a post is error-free.

But I was not really talking against spelling or typos (that can happen to anyone), but more fundamental difficulties people have with syntax and especially with being coherent.

This is known as Muphry's Law. (Yes, like that.) It's on Wikipedia.

But is that really "practice?" If someone doesn't care or is passionate about a subject, they won't become an expert. With many of these 10,000 hour studies, practice and play are indistinguishable... it engrosses them and they love to learn and teach themselves.

Or spell 'sentence'.

Are you trying to make a point with your comment, or simply pointing out the error? Either way, I don't see much value in your comment at present.

Well, I'm not a native/10.000 hours english speaker, so not much irony there.

And even if I was, it would only help prove my point. It's a win-win mistake!

That's like being surprised that after 10,000 hours of practicing basic arithmetic you don't know any algebraic topology.

I've had mixed feelings on this.

On one hand, I believe that "practice" in this sense is greatly misunderstood. This word normally implies a kind of deliberate action, that you intend to practice for an hour or so. In reality, most of our productive practice comes from the times that you probably don't know you're practicing. For example, when you sing in the shower, you are exercising your vocal chords and making them stronger. That's practice. When you drum the beat of the song on your desk, or even write a new one, and comprehend the rhythms...that's practice. Simply hearing a song could be considered "practice" for a composer. When I was in school, and later in conservatory, the teachers always gave us hard minimums for practice: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour...every day. This seemed like peanuts to me, because how could anyone really not practice for that short of a time and still feel as though they are interested in music?

On the other hand, I do believe in what these people say. Talent is an illusion. It's a way other people describe the long and arduous work you've done to get to this point. In many ways, when people say I am "talented" at something, I find it slightly demoralizing...because it rejects all of the intense hard work and thousands of hours that I put into my craft in order to get to this point (and I don't even believe I'm really a good enough programmer OR musician to be talking from any kind of pulpit). But I don't get too bent out of shape, because I know that deep down, they do understand what "talent" really means.

Deleted comment

Jack of all trades, master of none.

This guys [0] is trying this with gold. He should hit 10.000 hours at December 2016. I read about it a year or two ago and put it into my calendar.

http://thedanplan.com/about/

Uh, that's the same guy the article mentions.

And it's not gold, it's golf.

And it's not guys, it's guy's.

But apart from that, you're spot on.

Oh, sorry about that. I just came home from a looong bus ride when writing that.

my experience has been that you can get pretty close to becoming an expert with practicing on your own.

but a lot of times i reached a point where i needed support to break a certain barrier. when i say support i mean an expert. someone that can help make things better.

sometimes though, this is not true. sometimes too much invalid practice lead to the expert saying i don't like to deal with this sort of stuff. "i have make you unlearn a lot of the mistakes you learned before."

this is extremely true in society. while you might argue that the following is not practice and expertise, it's classic case of mental practice from invalid societal patterns https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302645

It can. 48 hours might also make you an expert, or a lifetime, or you may never become an expert, or you might be born an expert. I was born an expert in screaming very loudly and getting lost, for instance. It depends on who you are and what you are trying to become an expert in.

You can't become an expert without staying in "the Beginner's mind" (as in the Zen meaning of the phrase).

You are a little over a year old 10000 hours into your life and you are hardly and expert at that point :P

At that age most babies are experts at getting their parents to do everything for them...

I'd say going from total incompetence to walking, communicating, and generally surviving despite minimal training assistance is pretty darned successful.

"An expert is someone who's far away from home and gives advice"

  -- anonymous

There is a difference in practicing for 10,000 hours and practicing for 1 hour 10,000 times.

Gladwell's over-simplification is a curse on us all.

I think that deliberate practice is both better and worse than actual practice; you need both.

This is kind of sexist. It suggest anyone can become expert in a few years, yet women are clearly discriminated everywhere.

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